Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

24 DER FUEHRERthey are disposed to pass their knowledge on. We give them a littleencouragement; they open their hearts. And then the time comes. Onenight we get into an automobile together. Two comrades 'happen' to bealong. Out into the woods; we raise our gun to the fellow's head, andboom. That is how we fight against traitors.The struggle was nourished on a wild hatred from man to man.During a communist uprising near Merseburg the leader of a policedetachment learned that a troop of seventy rebels had been seen in thevicinity; the soldiers jumped on their bicycles and rode out against theenemy. An encounter followed, and 'all the rebels fell,' according to alater printed report. No quarter was given, no prisoners taken. From adark thicket in the Black Forest, Erzberger, the minister who inducedGermany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, was shot. One night a fewyoung men swore a mortal oath over their wine and beer; next morning,feverish and overwrought, they drove out in a car, overtook another car,and shot Minister Rathenau with an automatic Deputy Gareis planned toattack the army of secret murderers in the Bavarian parliament; thenight before the session he came home late. As he was opening thedoor, two shots rang out in the darkness. Gareis was dead, his murdererswere never found. Men vanished without trace; how many corpses thewoods concealed can only be guessed; a woman was found dead at thefoot of a tree, over her head a note was pinned with the words: 'Lousybitch, you've betrayed the fatherland. So you are judged by the BlackHand.' One Pohner was president of the Munich police, a brilliantofficial, an extraordinary jurist; later he became a judge of the highestcourt in Bavaria. Someone said to him that beyond a doubt there wereorganizations of murderers at large. With an icy glance through hispince-nez, Pohner, the judge, replied: 'Yes, but too few!'In the Bavarian ministry of justice sat a high official, appointed tosolve these murders. Actually he had been put there not to solve themand not to find the murderer; that was his unwritten task. His name wasFranz Guertner, and he was a man of no ordinary abilities. A fewhundred steps away, in police headquarters, sat a colleague, also a highgovernment official, whose official function was likewise to prosecutepolitical murderers; but he, too, had